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Every day there is more and more news coming from HIV research. The HIV pandemic is not over, and some may say it is only just beginning. Thirty-three million are currently infected and there are 7,000 new cases daily. The search for antiretroviral therapy is still on, but for many countries, a drug response just is not enough. The creation of an HIV vaccine is crucial to the eradication of the disease. This would be an injection that when taken, could prevent someone from ever catching the disease. Since prevention often costs less than treatment, this is especially important to those less fortunate.

The current antiretroviral treatment that HIV research has made available is too costly for many patients, and there are potentially long-term side effects. Also, daily compliance with the treatment is required. This is extremely hard to monitor in those who cannot afford consistent medical care. This is one reason the HIV pandemic continues to worsen. The discovery of an HIV vaccine could curb this by preventing many from catching the disease altogether. Those most at risk could be vaccinated in mass clinics, much as the flu is done in many countries. Continue reading ‘Both an HIV Vaccine and an HIV Cure Are Needed’ »

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With the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (ART), life expectancy of HIV-infected patients has notably increased as well as their quality of life.

However, HIV/AIDS has not become a chronic, manageable disease, as politicians and drug companies would like us to believe. As HIV remains in latent reservoirs, the infection rekindles each time ART is stopped, even after more than 10 years of constant viral suppression. For those who cannot maintain a strict compliance to ART, HIV resistant strains are progressively selected, leading to the use of more complex regimens with a higher pill burden. A lot of uncertainties remain concerning the cumulative toxicities of ART, its role in premature aging, frailty, and its capacity to block completely disease progression, in particular in the brain. Continue reading ‘Bringing HIV Cure As Top Priority’ »

HIV experts are optimistic about a recent study in which researchers were able to reconfigure blood cells, making them resistant to HIV. This trial was done on six HIV infected patients successfully treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART). But experts are not sure yet if this will actually be a cure to the deadly disease, though they all agree it is a step in the right direction. This study was done after a man in Berlin received a stem cell transplant and four years later is cured from HIV.

The HIV gene therapy results were announced in March 2011 during a medical conference in Boston, Massachusetts. This is a positive sign that there might be a cure found in the near future and will generate excitement in researchers to keep looking. This new approach will not completely eliminate HIV from the body, but it will make the virus controllable, most likely without the need of medication. It is called a functional cure. Continue reading ‘HIV Cure: Gene Therapy Results Still Preliminary’ »

Despite some very impressive advances in the treatment and care for individuals afflicted with HIV, this disease still affects over 33 million people throughout the world. Additionally, more than 7000 new cases of HIV infection are reported every day. Individuals in developing parts of the world find it difficult, if not impossible, to receive and pay for treatment. While there is no doubt that the medications currently available have enabled individuals with HIV to live longer fuller lives, it is financially unsustainable to provide these very expensive medications to every person in the world with HIV/AIDS for the rest of their lives.

Treatment of HIV is incredibly lucrative force pharmaceutical companies. The cost of medications required to manage the disease can reach as much as $25,000 a year. With almost 2/3 of the people who are infected with HIV living in Africa and only a third of them being able to access treatment, it is more important than ever to finally find an HIV cure to end this devastating illness. Pharmaceutical companies may actually be hesitant to pursue the research necessary to find a cure because lifelong treatment for infected individuals is so profitable for them. Continue reading ‘HIV Cure: New Drugs And Commitment Needed’ »

New compounds to flush out HIV reservoirs are being discovered, and an HIV cure may be on the horizon within the next 2 decades. Although antiretroviral therapy (ART) is able to stop disease progression, new kind of drugs are needed if scientists want to eradicate the virus because it remains silent is the so-called HIV reservoirs during ART.

HIV, short for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is the virus that causes AIDS, an incurable disease that is one of the leading causes of deaths worldwide, with millions of people dying from the disease yearly. HIV is mainly transmitted through practicing unsafe sex, sharing contaminated needles, breast milk, and perinatally, meaning from an infected mother to her child at birth. Continue reading ‘New Compounds To Flush Out HIV Reservoirs: Is A HIV Cure On The Horizon?’ »

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Despite numerous advancements in HIV treatment over the last decade, the disease is still far from being cured. While the immediate ‘death sentence’ of an HIV diagnosis isn’t quite what it once was, patients living with HIV still face an uphill battle filled with more frequent sickness, countless drug treatments, and an ultimately shorter lifespan. Controlling HIV means a constant barrage of highly active antiretroviral treatment, or HAART. The moment these treatments are halted, the virus rears its ugly head once again. Numerous scientists have become optimistic about a new scientific strategy towards an HIV cure that involves hunting down the virus in a surprising way.

You can’t kill what you can’t find, and as HAART takes effect in the body and begins to counteract the virus, HIV basically hides out in the immune system’s CD4 T cells. Here it can stay dormant, hidden from the immune system for decades until the CD4 T cells are activated again by a pathogen. When these cells go on the offensive, HIV springs back to life as well and renews its attack on the immune system. In short, a body that was practically free from active HIV is once again riddled with the disease. But researchers are beginning to put faith in their abilities to awaken the CD4 T cells, and attack HIV as soon as it begins its own assault. Continue reading ‘Scientific Strategy Towards HIV Cure: Waking A Killer in Order To Kill It’ »

HIV and AIDS have been the focus of a battle that has raged for over three decades – the battle for a cure. And while many researchers had long ago written a total cure off as impossible, focusing instead on prolonging a patient’s life through various drugs, a man named Timothy Brown has recently began to cause most of these researchers to reconsider their stance. When he contracted both leukemia and HIV, his oncologist decided that stem cell transplant was the key to helping him survive. But during the process, donor cells from a donor with a natural HIV resistance were used. The results were staggering.

After undergoing the transplant and radiation treatment, no HIV could be found in Brown’s body. He was, in essence, cured of the ‘incurable’ disease. And this proof of concept has shown that researchers can look beyond daily drug cocktails to find a way to finally win the battle against HIV and AIDS. Brown is but the first step towards this goal, and numerous different research topics are making strides towards a cure. Most of these focus on the last major hurdle for eradicating HIV – the virus’ long term latency in reservoirs inside the body. Four of these avenues seem especially promising. Continue reading ‘HIV Cure Research – From Proof Of Concept To Action’ »

The deadly HIV virus has taken the lives of millions since it was first discovered and researchers are now wonder if a functional HIV cure within a decade is possible. Researchers around the world are working to determine what prevents the virus from being eradicated and have reached some conclusions with regard to curing patients with HIV. In some cases, cells that are infected are present in clusters which make it difficult to fight the virus. Often the problem exists because there aren’t enough functioning T cells that are specific to HIV.

Will there be a functional HIV cure within a decade? In 1996 researchers began administering powerful anti-HIV medications in the form of cocktails, in the hopes that they’d prevent the onset of AIDS. It soon became evident that although the condition of many HIV patients did improve, they weren’t actually cured of the virus due to remaining cells in the body that were infected with a latent form of virus. Researchers are spending millions of dollars on studies to hopefully find a cure, and now it seems that it may be possible due to stem cell research. Recently a leukemia patient infected with HIV had an unusual stem cell transplant successfully completed. When further tests were conducted on the patient, no signs of the virus were present in his body. Continue reading ‘A Functional HIV Cure Within A Decade?’ »

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In the thirty years since HIV forced itself into the world’s consciousness, the goal has become to find a cure for the disease. It almost seemed inevitable that a vaccine or cure would be found someday, especially when it was discovered that the cause of the opportunistic infections was indeed a virus. In fact, improvements in antiretroviral therapy (ART) over the years have made it so HIV-positive people can live relatively normal lives with an undetectable viral load. his progress is important, because it brings the scientific community one step closer to finding a cure for HIV.

New hope for a cure emerged after the Berlin Patient was discovered. The patient, an HIV-positive man who also suffered from leukemia, was given a bone marrow transplant. The marrow donor was a person with a very rare genetic mutation that renders the person practically immune, or at very least highly resistant to acquiring HIV. This mutation, known as CCR5-delta-32, removes the coreceptor that HIV uses to enter the cells. Several years later, the patient is HIV-free, with no signs of the virus. Such a story is quite the medical breakthrough, but scientists and doctors have been very cautious. Continue reading ‘AIDS Turning 30: Now The Quest Of An HIV Cure’ »

In the past few years, finding a cure for HIV has emerged as a top priority. The reason is because antiretroviral therapy (ART) has pretty much reached its maximum level of effectiveness. When it comes to improving the power of antiretroviral medications, not much else can be done. So, now the attention turns to a cure-any type of cure. Actually, there are two types of cures that researchers are exploring, and either or both would be beneficial. The first is a sterilizing cure, which will eliminate HIV from the body completely; the second would reduce the HIV present in the body to an asymptomatic level so ART won’t be needed anymore-a functional cure.

Several different strategies have been explored in the quest to find an HIV cure. Gene therapy, immune strengthening, permanent suppression of latent virus, and certain types of drugs that work to flush HIV out of the reservoirs in the body where they hide – they’ve all been studied. HIV reservoirs are considered the final hiding place for HIV in the body, and the work will not rest until an effective strategy is developed to deal with them. They have been able to persist in HIV-positive patients-even those on ART-because they hide in places where ART can’t catch them.

Current antiretroviral medications are very effective at stopping HIV out in the open, and reduce their ability to transmit from one T-cell to another through the bloodstream; however, direct cell-to-cell transmission proves to be tricky, and ART isn’t quite as effective at stopping that. A different treatment strategy is needed. Residual HIV can be found up to 10 years after suppressive therapy has commenced, effectively making ART a lifelong practice and expense, since ART is not cheap. Adherence to such a treatment regimen can prove difficult and costly for many people around the world, especially in developing countries who lack quality access to these medications. Continue reading ‘HIV Reservoirs And The Quest Of An HIV Cure’ »